Museums and Clutter

Tonight I encountered the extravagant organized clutter of a local historical society museum. My creative writing students and I took a field trip in a turtletop minibus to the Elkhart County Museum in Bristol, Indiana to hear the energetic new curator, Nick Hoffman, give us a framework for museum studies before he opened the collection for us to gather inspiration for stories and poems. So many of the artifacts in this museum, started by a ladies' society in 1968, have no provenance--so the place is ripe for the imagination.

Visit the Elkart County Museum Blog here http://www.elkhartcountyhistoricalmuseum.blogspot.com/

In light of the personal examination of clutter and the right disposal of trash I've been doing, this museum seemed like a wildly overgrown garden of delights. The large child models for turn-of-the-twentieth century clothing, up to date mannequins in 1968, resembled a few dolls I'd had as a child--the mannequins themselves had become artifacts in the display. The women who put together the displays that have been gathering dust for over 40 years invested in a portrait of the past that represented an idealized picture of a white, upper middle class, protestant lifestyle. In 1968, the year in which Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy were assasinated, these women did not deem it necessary to represent Elkhart's recent Italian immigrants, nor its large African American population, nor its historic and long-standing Amish and Mennonite communities, nor its original Miami Indian inhabitants. In fact, the museum felt something like a bulwark against their sense of chaos. They would preserve a past, transplanted out of New England--farm implements from the Elkhart County town of Middlebury named for Vermont, the stained glass window from the Elkhart Congregational Church--and perhaps the rest would just disappear. They were doing what we all do--preserving what we value, ignoring what we choose not to remember.

But the museum also includes some objects that testify to a past we would rather forget. Nick set up a display for my students that included a black clay sambo doll named "Jose," with eyes that rolled up into its head in rhythm with an ominous ticking noise, as though it were a time bomb about to go off. The doll appeared to have been made about a hundred years ago, but its clothes were not original. Its spring-armed clay hands held something--I can't remember what--that Nick didn't think it was originally designed to hold.

I'm glad someone help onto this junk for all these years so that we can know who we are and where we've been--what kinds of representations were once deemed acceptable. Otherwise, we'd just repeat the past. But, as my husband once reminded me when we were first married, our home is not a museum. Then he meant the comment to suggest that everything didn't need to be as neat and orderly as i wanted to keep it. Since that time, he's often regretted the statement, thinking that it opened the floodgates to kids and clutter and the occasionally tended disorder we now live in. But now I mean it in the sense that, in fact, I do not have to keep every record of every person who ever moved through the house. I can let go of some things. Every day we are born anew. But we carry everyone we have ever loved, every deed with us, whether or not we keep the artifacts. It's only when we want to share the past with others that our artifacts are useful. But perhaps we need to leave that up to future generations who decide to excavate a landfill.